Avatar's Third Dimension: Peoples, Profits and 'Progress'

During the past two weeks we, like thousands of other people worldwide, went to see the film Avatar and were both blown away by the beautiful realization of the world of Pandora in which the film is set. It is a movie that seems to be generating more than just record-breaking ticket sales, Golden Globe nominations and Oscar tips. Given the nature of the film and its eco-centric message, it has unsurprisingly generated some controversy.

The American right have railed against its anti-American message. Nile Gardiner of the Telegraph describes the movie as "a cynical and deeply unpatriotic propaganda piece, aimed squarely against American global power and the projection of US economic and military might across the world". Similarly the Vatican was strongly critical of its artistic merits, although it is hard not to think they were actually put out by the fact that an imagined people on a distant planet in a distant future were following a religion of their own which was not Catholicism. Perhaps more strangely there are growing reports of depression linked to watching Avatar amongst people unable to cope with re-entry from Pandora into the real world, and the realisation that they were not one of the Na´vi people living in harmony with nature. This has all the makings of a classic urban myth, but has helped to keep the movie making headlines.
Perhaps the funniest contribution to the debate about Avatar comes in the form of a claim from Matt Bateman that it is really a remake of Disney’s Pocahontas. Although the Pocahontas reference is a humorous one, it highlights a message in the film that has rather been overshadowed by the controversies about religion, anti-Americanism and the parallels with the Iraq war.

The film revisits a story that is also part of America’s past (a past in which America was Pandora), and one that has been played out across our World for hundreds of years, in which the interests of the indigenous people of a place are swept aside by the mineral and material demands of a more 'developed' people from somewhere else. One of the themes of Avatar is that the Na´Vi do not want anything those after the mineral deposits can offer, they do not want their technologies or their products, they just want to continue with their traditional way of life. Avatar provides a rather idealised and romanticised view of the lives of an indigenous people, but there is a growing realisation that the traditional lifestyles of indigenous peoples are often remarkably sustainable and resilient, until of course they encounter the germs or the guns of more developed peoples. This poses some interesting questions about whether industrialised economies can learn any sustainability lessons from indigenous peoples and lifestyles, a theme explored by David Maybury-Lewis’s excellent book 'Millennium'.
The UN estimates that there are some 370 million indigenous peoples throughout the world, many still living relatively traditional lives and many with livelihoods that depend very directly on ecosystem services. In many ways they are amongst those most at risk from the impacts of unsustainable development, and are often the most overlooked group in discussions about sustainability marketing. Their dependence on the natural environment means that in many regions they live largely outside the consumer economy, and although many of them are impoverished, this is not because of a lack of economic development, but more accurately because economic development has often disrupted traditional livelihoods and relationships with the environment. As Ted Moses, Grand Chief of the Crees said in testimony to the UN: "I am not against development, but would like you to know that indigenous people know development primarily as victims of development".
Although the rights of indigenous peoples were recognised in the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the clash of worlds depicted in Avatar continues on a daily basis on planet Earth. This is an issue which is close to the interests of BRASS researchers who have been conduction research on the relationships between mining companies and local communities affected by mineral extraction in Latin America, Africa and Russia. It is a subject where there are few simple answers, but where there will be many future difficult questions to tackle. The pressure for land and resources will only become more intense with a growing world population and expanding material expectations.
Whether the world can live up to the sentiments of the UN's declaration and protect the rights of indigenous peoples in the face of growing pressure on land and resources remains to be seen. Bringing the plight of indigenous peoples to life in breath-takingly vivid three-dimensional splendour might just encourage consumers in industrialised countries to spare a thought for those people who get in the way during the struggle to obtain the resources that our consumer economies depend upon.